The Pacific Grove Museum of Natural History

Facing the radiant Monterey Bay, anchored proudly between Pacific Grove's downtown and famed Lovers Point beach, is the Pacific Grove Museum of Natural History. The historic museum was founded in 1883 to house specimens collected by the Chautauqua Literary and Scientific Circle in the days when horse-drawn carriages still meandered down a dirt road known today as Lighthouse Avenue. What started as a small octagonal building in what is now known as Jewell Park soon became a more impressive edifice, thanks largely to the help of community members like Mary Norton, the museum's first curator, and Lucie Chase, who donated to the construction of a new building in 1932. Others, including noted collector and taxidermist Rollo Beck and scientist Ed Ricketts, friend of author and Pacific Grove resident John Steinbeck, donated amazing specimens that remain on display.

In Images of America: The Pacific Grove Museum of Natural History, author Patrick Whitehurst has drawn from a wide array of sources—museum archives, personal photographs, the Monterey Herald newspaper, and other collections, including the C.K. Tuttle Collection housed at the museum and the Heritage Society of Pacific Grove—to detail the story of this long-standing local institution.